On the retrieval of soil moisture from SAR data over bare soils

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of estimating soil moisture content from single angle and single frequency SAR data. To reach this objective, a priori information such as profile height std is assumed. An inversion technique based on a neural approach trained with the IEM model is presented and its performances are discussed. Two sources of errors in the final estimates are analyzed. Errors due to the limited input information and errors due to possible failures of IEM in predicting scattering from natural surfaces.